Thus it was that this grotesque personage, this pale, flabby, tun-bellied citizen became, in one night, a terrible captain, whom nobody dared to ridicule any more.  He had steeped his foot in blood.  The inhabitants of the old quarter stood dumb with fright before the corpses.  But towards ten o’clock, when the respectable people of the new town arrived, the whole square hummed with subdued chatter.  People spoke of the other attack, of the seizure of the mayor’s office, in which a mirror only had been wounded; but this time they no longer pooh-poohed Rougon, they spoke of him with respectful dismay; he was indeed a hero, a deliverer.  The corpses, with open eyes, stared at those gentlemen, the lawyers and householders, who shuddered as they murmured that civil war had many cruel necessities.  The notary, the chief of the deputation sent to the town-hall on the previous evening, went from group to group, recalling the proud words “I am prepared!” then used by the energetic man to whom the town owed its safety.  There was a general feeling of humiliation.  Those who had railed most cruelly against the forty-one, those, especially, who had referred to the Rougons as intriguers and cowards who merely fired shots in the air, were the first to speak of granting a crown of laurels “to the noble citizen of whom Plassans would be for ever proud.”  For the pools of blood were drying on the pavement, and the corpses proclaimed to what a degree of audacity the party of disorder, pillage, and murder had gone, and what an iron hand had been required to put down the insurrection.

Moreover, the whole crowd was eager to congratulate Granoux, and shake hands with him.  The story of the hammer had become known.  By an innocent falsehood, however, of which he himself soon became unconscious, he asserted that, having been the first to see the insurgents, he had set about striking the bell, in order to sound the alarm, so that, but for him, the national guards would have been massacred.  This doubled his importance.  His achievement was declared prodigious.  People spoke of him now as “Monsieur Isidore, don’t you know? the gentleman who sounded the tocsin with a hammer!” Although the sentence was somewhat lengthy, Granoux would willingly have accepted it as a title of nobility; and from that day forward he never heard the word “hammer” pronounced without imagining it to be some delicate flattery.

While the corpses were being removed, Aristide came to look at them.  He examined them on all sides, sniffing and looking inquisitively at their faces.  His eyes were bright, and he had a sharp expression of countenance.  In order to see some wound the better he even lifted up the blouse of one corpse with the very hand which on the previous day had been suspended in a sling.  This examination seemed to convince him and remove all doubt from his mind.  He bit his lips, remained there for a moment in silence, and then went off for the purpose of hastening the issue of the “Independant,” for which he had written a most important article.  And as he hurried along beside the houses he recalled his mother’s words:  “You will see to-morrow!” Well, he had seen now; it was very clever; it even frightened him somewhat.